A citizen scientist working with NASA has detected an old, cold dying star that may provide a window into the fate of our own solar system billions of years from now.
Melina Thévenot, a citizen scientist from Germany, detected an anomaly while searching through data collected by the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft. At first, she believed it was bad data, but when she looked at the source in the images from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, she decided the data might be valuable and handed it over to the team working on the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen scientist project.
The leads on that project decided to follow up on the finding, re-positioning the Keck II telescope in Hawaii to take a deeper look. With their new set of eyes focused on the tiny spot in the sky, Keck II confirmed the blip wasn't bad data -- it was the oldest, coldest white dwarf we've ever spotted -- and it is circled by a peculiar set of dusty rings. The discovery appears Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"This white dwarf is so old that whatever process is feeding material into its rings must operate on billion-year timescales," said John Debes, an astronomer and lead author on the study. "This star is really challenging our assumptions of how planetary systems evolve."
